Friday, May 13, 2005

I just finished teaching a course on Advertising and Consumer Culture in the Film Studies Department of a certain university in Eastern Ontario, and one of the online resources that I used in my preparation for the course—and one that I referred my students to—is Duke University’s impressive "Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850-1920" archive. Check it out and you’ll find all kinds of texts and visual materials there documenting the birth of modern consumer culture in the United States—cigarette cards, flyers, posters, outdoor advertising, broadsides, postcards, and “Kodakiana”—you name it—it’s all there. One of the most amazing sections of this website, though, is the section dealing with "advertising cookbooks" from 1879-1929, the Nicole Di Bona Peterson Collection, which contains several dozen examples in full-text format including covers, title pages and illustrations. If you’re a fan of vintage cookbooks and recipes and/or vintage food illustrations, or you’re just interested in how American corporations and other institutions seized upon the cookbook as a vehicle for advertising and early branding, this is the place for you. You’ll find everything from the Best War Time Recipes of 1917, according to the Royal Baking Powder Co. of New York, to Knox Gelatine’s Dainty Desserts for Dainty People, to The Story of Coffee and How to Make It, as brought to you by the good people at Maxwell House, to How Phyllis Grew Thin with the help of the Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine Co. of Lynn, MA.

The lovely chocolates produced by our friends at Walter Baker & Co., Ltd. (established 1780!), including the ever-so-tantalizingly named Smith College Fudge, Wellesley Marshmallow Fudge, and Vassar Fudge.

I’m including a scan of some of Frigidaire’s recipes for your perusal, dear readers. Personally, I’m a little unsure about adding Jell-O to my ice cream (especially lemon Jell-O), but I might just try the Maple Ice Cream or the Strawberry Ice Cream this weekend anyway. (Then again, my maternal Grandmother always used to insist that Jell-O was good for my bones.)

I love the Jell-O recipe booklets. They've been published almost continually for over 100 years. I like that each individual booklet represents a small snapshot of a particular point in time, while collectively, they represent a century's worth of successful product branding. Such an amazingly complete portrait, all based on a simple box of colored sugar.

Judith Herman and Marguerite Shalett Herman, The Cornucopia, Being a Kitchen Entertainment and Cookbook Containing Good Reading and Good Cookery From More Than 500 Years of Recipes, Food Lore &c. as Conceived and Expounded by the Great Chefs & Gourmets of the Old and New Worlds Between the Years 1390 and 1899 Now Compiled and Presented to the Public in a Single Handsome and Convenient Volume